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By Dan Nosowitz
A report from the Office of the Inspector General found that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was not only slow to find problems in food production but that it often didn't take the right steps to correct violations and ensure that proper procedures were followed after violations were found. Foodborne illnesses, in some ways, are on the rise, and certainly, reporting of those violations are more visible than ever before. But there are still issues to correct.
Last week, the FDA released an announcement that there would be a significant change in the reporting of food recalls: there is now guidance that encourages reporting of exactly where tainted food is sold. In the past, the FDA would single out the supplier, but not necessarily the specific retail locations where products were sold. This isn't always a problem; the FDA does give out product batch numbers, which can be checked against the product itself, or will list the specific brand name of a product.
But there are also products where this is a significant issue. Some products don't come with batch numbers at all, like produce, deli meats or nuts. In that case, it can be difficult to figure out, as a consumer, whether you've actually purchased one of the affected products. So the FDA's new guidelines provide a bit more power: they will, in cases like those un-numbered products, list the exact retail locations where affected food was sold.
Though probably inadvertent, this change is well-timed, as a significant recall of ground beef from Cargill was announced last week. More than 130,000 pounds of the ground beef, sold in nationwide retailers including Target, Sam's Club and Albertson's, has been recalled due to fears of E. coli contamination. The USDA, which regulates meat recalls—the FDA handles everything else, which, yes, is confusing—attributed 17 illnesses and one death to the tainted meat. The USDA, for its part, already lists the specific retail locations that sold affected products.
Reposted with permission from our media associate Modern Farmer.
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By Bijal Trivedi
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released a report on Nov. 13 that describes a list of microorganisms that have become resistant to antibiotics and pose a serious threat to public health. Each year these so-called superbugs cause more than 2.8 million infections in the U.S. and kill more than 35,000 people.
By Franziska Spritzler, RD, CDE
Inflammation can be good or bad depending on the situation.
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By Joe Vukovich
Under the guise of responding to consumer complaints that today's energy- and water-efficient dishwashers take too long, the Department of Energy has proposed creating a new class of dishwashers that wouldn't be subject to any water or energy efficiency standards at all. The move would not only undermine three decades of progress for consumers and the environment, it is based on serious distortions of fact regarding today's dishwashers.
By Emily Moran
If you have oak trees in your neighborhood, perhaps you've noticed that some years the ground is carpeted with their acorns, and some years there are hardly any. Biologists call this pattern, in which all the oak trees for miles around make either lots of acorns or almost none, "masting."
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By Catherine Davidson
Tashi Yudon peeks out from behind a net curtain at the rooftops below and lets out a sigh, her breath frosting on the windowpane in front of her.
Some 700 kilometers away in the capital city Delhi, temperatures have yet to dip below 25 degrees Celsius, but in Spiti there is already an atmosphere of impatient expectation as winter settles over the valley.
The Dog Aging Project at the University of Washington is looking to recruit 10,000 dogs to study for the next 10 years to see if they can improve the life expectancy of man's best friend and their quality of life, as CNN reported.